Shaping the Rural-Urban Symbiosis: Density, Dispersal, Remoteness, and Town Size in South-East Australia

Within the context of economic and social change in rural Australia, this paper identifies four structural dimensions of non-metropolitan communities that are shown to influence a range of areal and socio-demographic characteristics. The analysis shows that such influence is essentially maintained whether the social catchments forming the database are subdivided by State or by an equivalent number of landscape types. Also, although the dimensions influence both the urban and dispersed elements of the communities, the strength of the relationships is substantially greater if those elements are considered as a symbiotic whole. Throughout, net rural local density (as opposed to gross density) is shown to be a consistently important dimension of rural communities in relatively sparsely settled lands such as those of south-eastern Australia, supported by the important subsidiary influence of relative settlement dispersal and town size. The paper concludes with a discussion of the processes involved in the impact of those structural dimensions upon rural society.